I wonder if the first astrologers were city-dwellers. True, archeologists have found evidence that people who lived before the rise of cities paid close attention to the orbit of the Moon and identified constellations, and have argued that the orientations of temples and other religious structures from those days suggest that they attached a religious significance to the movements of heavenly bodies. Those activities are hardly surprising; farmers need a calendar to plan their year, as hunter-gatherers also need to plan their expeditions for times when game will be relatively plentiful and fruit ripe for the picking. Still, it might not be too much of a stretch to look at a society that invests heavily in maintaining and publicizing its calendar and to see a suggestion of something like what the western branch of organized Christianity used to call “natural astrology,” a set of ideas about ways in which heavenly bodies might influence the earth’s weather and various medical phenomena related to the transmission of disease.
Quite distinct from natural astrology are the various studies to which the Western Church used to refer as “judicial astrology.” That’s the part that includes horoscopes, sun signs, and the like. The difference matters when considering the origins of astrology; we have very ancient documents relating to the movements of heavenly bodies that seem to have some special significance and that predate the earliest references to judicial astronomy by centuries. So, I’ll use the terms.
It is sometimes said that our earliest evidence of judicial astronomy comes from Mesopotamia, but that is misleading. The nation state didn’t exist in those days; Ur and Lagash and Akkad and Babylon and the other urban centers that rose and fell in that region interacted with the political and economic systems of the countryside around them in a variety of ways, but in other ways they remained quite distinct. It is in such cities that we find the first documents describing judicial astrology.
If astrology did arise in cities, it arose in a social environment where markets were familiar. Its entire history would have taken place amid money, contracts, and production for exchange. That calls into question the assumptions that we discussed last year when this xkcd appeared:
Some people fall into the assumption that, because markets promote something called “rationality,” they must therefore favor every form of reason and disfavor every form of unreason. However, the rationality which comes from markets is in fact something of a very narrow sort. A month after our discussion, we noted that Shikha Dalmia had put it very well: “Markets don’t reward merit, they reward value.” Dalmia summarizes the views of economist Friedrich Hayek:
In a functioning market, Hayek insisted, financial compensation depends not on someone’s innate gifts or moral character. Nor even on the originality or technological brilliance of their products. Nor, for that matter, on the effort that goes into producing them. The sole and only issue is a product’s value to others. Compare an innovation as incredibly mundane as a new plastic lid for paint cans with a whiz-bang, new computer chip. The painter could become just as rich as the computer whiz so long as the savings from spills that the lid offers are as great as the productivity gains from the chip. It matters not a whit that the lid maker is a drunk, wife-beating, out-of-work painter who stumbled upon this idea through pure serendipity when he tripped over a can of paint. Or that the computer whiz is a morally stellar Ph.D. who spent years perfecting his chip.
As markets are neutral as to the virtue or vice of economic actors, so too are they neutral as to the truth or falsity of the ideas that those actors bring as products for sale. If falsehoods are in demand, falsehoods will sell; if truths are not in demand, their bearers will go begging. The mouseover text for the xkcd represents a nod to this fact, and an attempt to wriggle out of its implications: “Not to be confused with ‘selling this stuff to OTHER people who think it works,’ which corporate accountants and actuaries have zero problems with.” That won’t do, since it assumes that we can assign a fixed meaning to the expression “works.” An investment advisor who believes in astrology may not be any likelier than other advisors to beat the market, but s/he may very well use that belief to “make a killing,” if s/he attracts clients who strongly value such a belief. In that case, astrology would not “work” in the sense that quantitative analysts officially recognize, but it would make the advisor every bit as rich as it would if it did meet their definitions of success. As for whether it makes the clients rich, well, Fred Schwed answered that one in 1940:
Once in the dear dead days beyond recall, an out of town visitor was being shown the wonders of the New York financial district. When the party arrived at the Battery, one of his guides indicated some handsome ships riding at anchor. He said, “Look, these are the bankers’ and brokers’ yachts.” “Where are the customers’ yachts?,” asked the naive visitor.
Clearly, markets have not dissolved belief in astrology, any more than the continued non-existence of the customers’ yachts has discouraged people going to brokers and bankers. If the practice of judicial astrology first arose in cities, it may in fact be a by-product of market society. Perhaps we might find that judicial astrology began, not simply as a more elaborate version of a natural astrology that had long been a feature of rural life, but as an attempt to understand market interactions and the power of the market. In that case, it would qualify as a school of economics. One may wonder whether judicial astrology would be the most absurd such school in practice today.
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